Monday, April 18, 2011

Question about the Libertarian Party

The LP has always been a creation of the Koch's, and has periodically been purged when attempts have been made to stray from Koch-approved dogmas.

Since the success of the Kochs of swaying the Republican Party with their Tea Party insurrection, have they ignored the LP? Is it possible that the reform caucus has a chance of freeing the LP from the tyrannical hand of the Kochs?

9 comments:

So Mike, which LP planks would allegedly be discarded if LP had no Koch's support? I mean, yes, I've read your links about Kochtopus allright. I'm just asking, can you actually point to even ONE SINGLE plank as currently present at http://www.lp.org/platform which would NOT be there, or be changed, if there was no Kochtopus? If even YOU cannot do this, then it would definitely support my feeling that libertarians are uniquely immune to big business influence and your Koch boogeymen is irrelevant.

Joanna, you seem totally ignorant of the LP internal politics over the last 30 years. There have been several reform movements within the party which have proposed softening the planks. Each time (until recently) this has resulted in purges to maintain party purity, much as in various communist parties.

Why don't you read "Radicals For Capitalism", so that you're not so ignorant.

So Mike, which LP planks would allegedly be discarded if LP had no Koch's support? I mean, yes, I've read your links about Kochtopus allright. I'm just asking, can you actually point to even ONE SINGLE plank as currently present at http://www.lp.org/platform which would NOT be there, or be changed, if there was no Kochtopus?_____

It wouldn't be the anti-Constitutional racism, as that would be the equivalent of driving a stake into the heart of the Czarist Ayn Rant._____

If even YOU cannot do this, then it would definitely support my feeling that libertarians are uniquely immune to big business influence and your Koch boogeymen is irrelevant. _____

Ah, yes, your FEELING. Yet again you fail to wrap your irrationality in the disguising cloak of "self-evident assumptions" and "objective" projections of your wishful thinking.

Feeling and thought are different things. REASONING occurs not in feeling but in thought. Feeling, though, is the motivating energy behind altruism.

So I'll ask you:

Why, before entering into competitive "argument," do you first tie your shoelaces together?

If I made a graph of deities per religion, and put Catholicism at one deity, it might look rigorous and scientific. But if you look at real-world Catholic practice, you see claims of a 3-in-one god, you see Mariolitry (worship of mary), you see praying to saints, angels, ancestors, and Satan. All of them are objects of prayer, making them technically deities.

The graph makes it LOOK scientific. But science comes from measurement. The LRC has pretty graphs to show their ideas, but they are unscientific and misleading. Measurement would show them to be wrong.

For someone who has studied libertarianism for 16 years, you managed a rather high error percentage in a rather short post. The Kochtopus disowned the LP back in the 1980s, after Ed Crane left. The radicals purged the Kochtopus friendly faction. (I believe the term Kochtopus was coined by Murray Rothbard, but I could be wrong.) Dig around on mises.org for some of David Nolan and Murray Rothbard's rants against the Clark/Koch ticket of 1980 sometime.

The Reform Caucus got most of its support from people who want to get the LP back to its Koch friendly roots. I was trying to broaden it so it could encompass the current radicals, the Koch/CATO types and those in the Upper-Left where I now reside.

As for the diagrams: what pray tell is "pseudoscientific" about them? The diagrams are meant to be illustrative. The actual sizes of the color bars does require measurement on a case by case basis but I never claimed otherwise. At the time they were created the government was growing and civil liberties shrinking so it was quite reasonable to display an authoritarian bias for a typical legislature.

As for measurements, I have actually done some, and my measurements are better than the World's Smallest Political Quiz. Have a look at: http://quiz2d.com/stats/homepage/ This is not a randomized Gallop poll by any means. Take the data as qualitative only, and reflective of people on the Internet who take such quizzes. Deploy it at a fair and you get more conservatives and authoritarians.

The key takeaway is that among those who take such a quiz (a rather useful demographic for an outsider political party)you get about 3 1/2 times as many people in agreement or better by moderating. Pseudoscience indeed.

That said, I am no longer trying to salvage the LP, as I think the sweet spot is in the upper left of the bottom diagram (and the LP is still crippled by its membership oath and radical branding). I don't claim to have hard numbers to prove this, yet, but informal focus group studies have been promising.